It was imperative for the new PCTune logo and brand identity to present a
sense of professionalism as well as a truly unique image in the mobile PC repair market. It was also important that the new identity convey a sense of speed (for efficiency as well as for the improvement the customer sees in their PCs) as well as an old-school “family business” feel to it.

Building The Logo

There was one request when it came to constructing the new logo: it had to include the imagery, or at least the suggestion, of a tachometer or rev counter. Not only does this reference PCTune’s old logo, which featured a much more obvious image of a rev counter, but also nods to the ideas of speed and tuning.

As a base for the new PCTune logo, I eventually settled on working with the excellent Museo typeface from the very talented Jos Buivenga. It’s extremely tricky for a typeface to look both modern and retro but Museo manages it beautifully. I worked with the Heavy variant. And of course, a simple but very effective way of interpolating the sense of speed to any text is to italicise it, so that it “leans” with energy. However, the Museo family doesn’t include any oblique variants. Therefore, I had to italicise the Museo-set logotype myself. That took quite a while, ensuring all the curves and angles were consistent.

Once I had italicised the logotype to my satisfaction, I noted that the newly italicised ‘C’ lent itself brilliantly to being transformed into a kind of rev counter.

I also tightened the kerning of the type fairly heavily and made some other small modifications and clippings here and there (like clipping the start of the ‘u’ a little and moving the arms of the ‘T’ down a few pixels to match them with the x-height.)

Constructing The Other Components

The colour system of a complete identity system is extremely important. Colours are powerful emotional and psychological symbols, so we needed to be certain of what colours we were going to use in the new PCTune identity design. Research indicated that blue, particularly rich Royal blues, are very prominent in the computer world (in part, I suspect, to the abundance of blue used in Microsoft’s Windows XP interface and branding), so I wanted to tap into that familiarity but with a slight twist. We settled on a more “vintage” blue, slightly more desaturated and lighter, to lend towards that homely, friendly, “family business” feel. And, of course, when you want to create that sense of speed and energy, red is an excellent signifier of these ideas.

Time to apply the colour system to the logo…

When deciding on the corporate typeface for the new PCTune identity design, I wanted something that provided a nice contrast to the Museo used in the logo, was legible, professional and also “old-school”. Ultimately, I opted for the ITC Franklin Gothic family. This old grotesque sans-serif typeface provided a nice contrast in comparison to the PCTune logo but also lended itself nicely to the concepts of professionalism and a reliable, homely family business.

Making A Completely New System

So now it was time to combine all of these elements of the new PCTune identity system into a cohesive and strategic brand identity design. Starting with the stationery.

Since PCTune is a mobile PC repair service, then we need branded vehicles, don’t we?

I also created some fairly extensive Branding Guidelines documentation for PCTune as well. You can see a couple of the pages from the guidelines below.

A Running System

Ian, I would like to thank you for your understanding and professionalism….

The logo is who I am and what I stand for and always was from the start, thank you for making me see that eventually.

I have and will continue to recommended you wholeheartedly to whomever I encounter that requires a logo, I’ll be in contact with you soon about some more work.